I’ll be blogging about it once I have my arms around how to make it all work. As a teaser, here’s where I plan on going with it: Imagine an InstallShield 2009 Basic MSI project stripped of it’s UI sequence and driven by Winforms with a setup.exe bootstrapper uses setup prerequisites to install MSI 4.5 and .NET 2.0. Finally imagine a feature tree that merely has references to chained installs as feature prerequistes.

I have a new product line at work that I’m supporting that’s going to be creating about 10 installs chaining different combinations of about 70 micropackages. All of the code is written in VS2008 so it should be very interesting. I’m thinking of trying to make this look as slick as the Visual Studio 2008 install.

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Hello Chris.We implemented just such a system here with a winforms interface collecting data to pass to a series of silent MSIs. I was wondering, how do you handle the number of MSIs that show up in Add/Remove Programs ? We looked at setting ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT but after reading Heath Stewart's blog decided it was too complex and scary for us 🙂